Author Description

This text is designed to be used for introductory fluid mechanics for an engineering audience; it is used at Cornell for third-year Mechanical Engineering students. The text takes as its motivating framework the many machines that have fluid mechanics as its core: rocket nozzles, turbomachines, dams, boats, airplanes, quadcopters and helicopters, and machine components such as engines, transmissions, and bearings. The fundamentals covered include the governing equations prescribing hydrostatics, irrotational flow, inviscid incompressible and compressible flow, viscous flow, and acoustics. A variety of analytical techniques are used, such as control-volume and control-mass formulations, solution of Laplace, Stokes, and Euler equations for velocity and pressure fields, and methods for determining net forces on objects. The mathematical presentation includes vector and dyadic tensor formulations of the governing equations with Gibbs notation. Numerous haiku throughout are used to communicate key concepts or complain about pop culture trends that bemuse or annoy the author. Brian J. Kirby is the Meinig Family Professor of Engineering in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University, where he directs the Cornell Micro/Nanofluidics Laboratory. He was educated at the University of Michigan and Stanford University.